PygmyLinux & Pine & PPP & POP3

Peter Bantowsky peterban at jps.net
Fri Dec 17 16:02:25 PST 1999


[Using h/p Vectra VL Pentium-200MHz w/ WIN95-OSR-2 and Caldera OL-2.3]

I recently installed Pygmy-06 [from http://www.pygmy.penguin.cz] in a
compact Linux box in the WIN95 msdos partition (i.e. c:\linux).  Works
great as basic things go.  Until you try to use 'pine' with a 'ppp'
(modem) link into a POP3 smtp server on the Internet.  'pppsetup' works
fine and accessing hosts on the Internet with 'telnet' or 'lynx' also
works as advertised.  Does anyone know how to configure this animal so
that 'pine' interoperates with the 'ppp'+'pop3'+'smtp' stuff the way
other "mail user agents" do, such as Netscape Communicator's Messenger?

Preemtory caveat:  I have already found out that 'pine' revision 4.0 or
higher CAN handle POP3 server access (but not the older revisions) and
that Pygmy-06 comes with revision-3.96.  So, for one thing, 'pine' in
Pygmy needs to be updated.  Is 'pine' 4.21 available for Linux?  Further
(and again), how, exactly, do you configure 'pine' so that its INBOX is
at the external smtp server, and so that it assumes the dynamically
assigned localhost IP address which 'ppp' negotiates with that server?

Turns out that there is a 'pc-pine' release available [from
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/pine/pcpine] with the latest
revision-4.21.  So we can experiment with this embodiment while the
Pygmy issue dangles for the time being.  I downloaded 'pc-pine' and
installed it in c:\pine.  Has all the usual 'pine' whistles & bells and
then some, and it presents a respectable desktop window.  But the same
problem persists.  How do you couple 'pine' with 'ppp' and the link into
a POP3 smtp server on the Internet, when you're not hanging off a LAN
whose network admin function takes care of the bridging?

Why bother?  Because 'pine' loads a helluva lot faster than
Communicator's Messenger and is a very good mail tool for zipping
messages out fast.

--kpab





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